What we look for in Burns Beach, and why it differs from the suburb next door. 28.4 km from the CBD, on the coast, postcode 6028.
Burns Beach was Midland Railway Company land, set aside in 1908 as a camping and health resort reserve after fifty residents petitioned for it, and named after a farmer who ran sheep here. For decades it was reachable only by track. It now holds two kinds of property that could hardly be less alike.
Century old fishing village holiday shacks stand alongside brand new masterplanned estate homes, and the original caravan park is still operating. Those are opposite ends of every scale an inspector uses.
The shacks are pre and post war holiday dwellings. Expect asbestos, no modern footings or tie downs, and ad hoc additions accumulated over decades by owners doing their own work. On a building like that the first task is establishing what it actually is, because very little about it follows current practice.
The new estate stock is the reverse. Modern, documented, young. Recent construction where the questions are site classification, imported fill, drainage, and whether handover defects were dealt with while the builder was still liable. Stages are still completing, so some homes remain inside their defect liability period.
The suburb keeps a small coastal village character with a bushland buffer to the north, and the population skews older. This is an exposed hang gliding coast, so wind and salt are both strong. Delignification leads on any older tiled roof and coastal grade fixings are worth verifying on the new builds.
Two housing types, two quite different risk pictures.
On a shack, lightweight timber sits close to the ground with minimal subfloor ventilation, usually made worse by later enclosures. That is where inspection concentrates, and access is frequently poor.
On the estate homes there should be a durable notice recording the termite management system installed at construction. Find it, then check whether the landscaping put in since has buried the slab edge. In an estate where everyone gardens within a couple of years of handover, that happens quickly.
Coastal sand keeps general pressure low. That is the honest position. Timber in ground contact is the main route, and on an exposed coast fencing and retaining degrade fast and get replaced in stages, so recent untreated timber is usually somewhere on the property.
Whichever end of the suburb you are buying in, the work begins with establishing what the building is. Doing that once and assessing structure and pests against it beats two visits forming separate views. Reported under AS 4349.1 and AS 4349.3.
Estate stages are still completing, so handover inspections and the follow up before builder liability expires are regular work here. Condition records matter where construction adjoins an existing home, and near the older village that means shacks with no modern footings sitting beside heavy earthworks.
On a shack, ask what has been added and when. Owners usually know. Owners generally know, and on a building assembled in stages over eighty years that history is worth more than any measurement we could take.
Burns Beach holds the single widest age gap of any northern suburb, and which end of it you are buying flips the inspection entirely. At one extreme are century-old fishing-village holiday shacks; at the other, brand-new masterplanned estate homes. On a pre or post-war shack the checks are those of lightweight holiday construction never meant for permanent living: likely asbestos in the fabric, no modern footings or roof tie-downs, and ad-hoc additions that have to be read on their own merits. On a new estate home the work is the opposite — practical-completion and new-build defect checks, and dilapidation records where a lot sits beside active works. Establishing which of the two you are looking at is the first and most important step.
The coast does the rest. Burns Beach is an exposed hang-gliding coast, so strong wind and salt are constants, and the older stock in particular has taken decades of it. On any home the fixings, gutters, flashings and exposed metal are read for corrosion, and any older tiled roof gets a batten check for the delignification that frontline salt exposure drives. On the new builds the question is whether coastal-grade fixings and flashings were actually specified from handover, since that is a common shortfall on volume builds this close to the sea. A Burns Beach inspection sorts shack from estate home first, then reads the wind and salt into everything that follows.
On the ground that means two different days' work. On a shack the structure is read from the footings up, since there may be none in the modern sense, and the roof tie-downs, the ad-hoc additions and the likely asbestos in the cladding are all traced and noted for licensed assessment. On a new estate home the slab and its site classification lead, the coastal specification of fixings and flashings is checked against what was actually built, and the roof plumbing and sarking are read for the workmanship that varies stage to stage. Across both, the exposed frontage means any exposed metal and any older roof's battens get read hard for the wind-driven salt this coast delivers.
None of it is guesswork. Reading the stock above into an inspection, these are the checks the Burns Beach pattern pushes to the top of the list:
Burns Beach sits on the Quindalup dune system — young calcareous sand, still mobile in places, and thin over the water table near the front. Sand this young has low bearing capacity but very little reactivity, so footing movement is uncommon and drainage problems are not. What the ground gives you here it takes back in the air.
What that means in practice, on a house in Burns Beach:
Landform is assigned from the suburb's position on the Swan Coastal Plain rather than from a site soil test. It tells you what to expect, not what you have. A site classification to AS 2870 is a different exercise and a different report.
Tamala Park is the fixed point most people in Burns Beach navigate by. Buildings like it are useful to an inspector for a duller reason: they date the area. Whatever era put that up is usually the era that put up the houses around it, and the construction methods of that decade are what we expect to find in the roof.
Kinross, Iluka, Currambine, Connolly and Ocean Reef sit on the same ground as Burns Beach, so the footing behaviour and the drainage problems tend to repeat across all of them. If you are comparing houses across those suburbs, you are largely comparing the same site conditions.
Joondalup is 4.0 km away but sits on the Spearwood dune system. That is the useful thing about this part of Perth: the ground can change inside a few kilometres, and with it what an inspection is looking for.
On site classification: any soil zone quoted for a suburb is indicative, inferred from geography rather than surveyed. A real AS 2870 classification comes from geotechnical work on your actual block and can differ from the one next door. We report what we observe; we do not read your soil class off a map.
The inspection is visual and non-invasive, over the readily accessible areas, reported to AS 4349.1. Our inspectors physically enter the roof space, as long as there is sufficient access. Report within 24 hours of the inspection.
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Flat fee, the same in Burns Beach as anywhere: $440 inc. GST for a pre-purchase building inspection, or $616 inc. GST with the timber pest scope added in the same visit. Full price list →
Right on the coast in Joondalup, and salt does the damage this close to the water. The flat fee buys a hard look at the tile battens for delignification, at the wall ties and metal fixings for corrosion, and at the rust bleed through render that looks cosmetic and is not. The tiled-roof void is the priority.
Pre-purchase building inspection in Burns Beach →
Building and pest inspection in Burns Beach →
Yes. Our inspectors physically enter and inspect the roof space, as long as there is sufficient access to do so safely. Where access is restricted, the report says so plainly rather than implying we saw more than we did.
Burns Beach is on the coast, inside the band where delignification should be expected in tile battens. On a tiled roof more than about ten years old it is one of the first things we look at.
Within 24 hours of the inspection itself, not 24 hours from booking. On a pre-purchase or pre-settlement job that timing is the whole point, because your leverage disappears once you are committed.
We would rather you checked than took our word for it. These are the bodies that actually hold the records and set the rules:
Tell us about the property and what you need. We'll come back to you with a firm quote and a time.
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